Few industry executives are too certain about what big new 5G innovations will develop, and we should not be at all surprised by that lack of clarity.
The reason futurists and industry executives have been generally unable to accurately predict the development of new use cases, applications and business models in the era of 3G and 4G, and will similarly find the same task difficult in the 5G era is that each of those network generations might be considered complex systems.
And one attribute of a complex system is that they are virtually impossible to model reliably, as chaos theory suggests.
A complex system is composed of many components which may interact with each other, and where small initial changes can have very-large, unexpected outcomes (the butterfly effect).
Examples of complex systems often are said to include Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, power grids, transportation or communication systems, social and economic organizations (cities).
An often-used example is an ecosystem. And it is reasonable to describe the entire connectivity business (fixed, mobile, satellite, other networks) as now existing as part of a larger internet ecosystem. And if a single complex system is intrinsically difficult to model, an ecosystem of complex systems arguably is impossible to model accurately over time.
In large part, uncertainty about 5G exists because all complex systems are inherently highly dynamic, where no single actor in the ecosystem can direct progress. Also, the connectivity business as a whole now is part of the internet ecosystem.
It is easy enough to point out the differences between the connectivity function and the applications and services that take advantage of internet connectivity. But even those important distinctions do not fully capture the differences.
Ever since the global telecom industry decided that internet protocol was the next-generation network, the industry has had to adapt to a business ecosystem where the creation of services and apps can easily be conducted by third parties with no business relationship with any connectivity provider.
And that changes everything. Yesterday, telecom was a complex system of its own. Today, the whole connectivity function is part of the broader internet ecosystem. The fundamental change is that connectivity providers no longer control the scale or pace of business development of the whole ecosystem.
Where today the assumption is that system conflicts must be resolved and resolved centrally and uniformly, a complex system actually requires decentralized control.
Where a complex system inherently features conflicting, unknowable, and diverse requirements, today’s assumption is that requirements can be known in advance, and will change slowly. That leads to the assumption that tradeoff decisions will be stable.
But complex systems have inherently unknowable behaviors.
Where today’s notion is that system improvements can be, and are, introduced at discrete intervals, complex systems evolve continuously. Where it once was believed that the telecom industry could make changes where the effects could be predicted sufficiently well, complex systems do not support such certainty.
Where it was believed that the configuration information for any specific change was accurate and could be tightly controlled, a complex system actually means changes happen in an inconsistent environment.
All of that explains why nobody really can predict what will develop in the 5G and subsequent eras of mobility.
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